On 24 Aug 2007 at 20:43, John Howell wrote: > As to adapting instrumentation to the music, I tried to point out that > most bands do not and cannot, with the possible exceptions of the wind > ensembles at large music schools or bands that consider themselves > truly professional. And of course among that handful of professional > bands we have to include the premier bands in each of the military > services, and they cannot blithely add instruments to order because > the players must be in the military and must be assigned to specific > bands and have their own line in the Table of Organization.
But that isn't the issue -- it's not adding odd instruments at all. There's nothing odd about the instrumentation of the Fulton pieces, except that we now use different transpositions and very closely related instruments (with the exception of cornets, which I would consider a hugely different instrument because of the completely different bore, which has huge consequences for both tone, articulation and agility). It's not a matter of needing to add a BBb contrabass clarinet or a bass sax, but a matter of using a C picc instead of Db, F horns instead of Db and so forth. Now, in college-level bands, surely the tenor sax majors and many of the altos also double on soprano, so I don't see how that would be incredibly difficult to come by one player for it (just as it's not hard to put a Bb Clarinet player on Eb -- nobody can make Eb Clarinet sound good :). So it's not a matter of adding instruments to the basic ensemble but of omitting instruments that are not used in the particular piece, and substituting the closest reasonable instruments when the originals are obsolete. That's what I don't see as happening, whereas these groups surely have the resources to do so. > And by the way, I agree with you that the best college wind ensembles > should be included at the professional level, but only because there > are so few truly professional wind ensemble, especially touring > ensembles in existence today. Again, there's a world of difference > between the band world and the orchestra world. I see wind ensemble as a different world, chamber music-oriented (one on a part, like an orchestral wind section), instead of massed instruments, so that's completely different -- they are always ad hoc in instrumentation, more or less. But I'm asking about something else entirely. Maybe I'm not explaining it well? Of course, I certainly believe that all new editions of these old works should include both the original parts and all the alternates that make it playable by standard modern bands. In the case of the Fulton, I just don't see any severe adaptation necessary (other than the cornet/trumpet thing, which is endemic in almost all historical band music, even that which remains in the repertory, like Sousa), and surely there's a host of pieces for which that is the case. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
